From iad@MATH.BAS.BG Sun Oct 22 13:08:39 2000 Return-Path: X-Sender: iad@math.bas.bg X-Apparently-To: lojban@egroups.com Received: (EGP: mail-6_1_0); 22 Oct 2000 20:08:38 -0000 Received: (qmail 8177 invoked from network); 22 Oct 2000 20:08:38 -0000 Received: from unknown (10.1.10.26) by m8.onelist.org with QMQP; 22 Oct 2000 20:08:38 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO lnd.internet-bg.net) (212.124.64.2) by mta1 with SMTP; 22 Oct 2000 20:08:35 -0000 Received: from math.bas.bg (ppp114.internet-bg.net [212.124.66.114]) by lnd.internet-bg.net (8.9.3/8.9.0) with ESMTP id XAA31340 for ; Sun, 22 Oct 2000 23:34:19 +0300 Message-ID: <39F326D2.6513D724@math.bas.bg> Date: Sun, 22 Oct 2000 20:41:38 +0300 X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.74 [en] (Win98; U) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: lojban@egroups.com Subject: Re: [lojban] Re: RE:literalism References: <8sv221+lb60@eGroups.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit From: Ivan A Derzhanski "Alfred W. Tueting (Tüting)" wrote: > BTW, just want to add that some peoples prefer kind of fu'ivla, > like the Maltese: > > skajskrejper - xorta ta' bini gholi hafna [...] > kind of very high building :-( Ah, but that's Maltese! Maltese regards the vocabulary of English almost as if it were its own. > How do the Arabs, Turks etc. handle this metaphor? > (gökdelen/gökdeldi? something with sky=gök) `sky-piercer' (better than `skyscraper', if you ask me). But in Persian one says `sky-scraper', . > Although pretty new to Lojban, I'm fighting on pycyn's side with > all my heart: total refrain from coining metaphoric tanru/lujvo > and sticking to literalism means death (better: abortion) or - in > the best case - self-castration to Lojban! [...] > My prophecy: Follow this way (of strict & constructivistic > literalism) and Lojban will be a dead languages before ever > having been born! There will be nothing left to "rejoice" about. Otoh, if Lojban survives at the cost of no longer being itself and instead becoming a code for , there will be just as little left to rejoice about. I'm willing to accept the argument that literal, transparent compounding has its limitations, and that at some point one does have to resort to metaphor. I am, however, in favour of keeping metaphor as a last-resort technique. Since the `sky scraping' metaphor is very widespread, its carrying over to Lojban would appear less scandalous than some other `naturalisms' do, but what does it do that {tcergaldi'u} or {galgaldi'u} do not? --Ivan